Prayer

“If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” 2 Chronicles 7:14

Prayer is intimacy with God that leads to the fulfillment of His purposes – Alvin Reed

Intercession is God’s brilliant strategy to include all His people in ruling with Him in power. It is so simple that anyone can do it, and yet it releases more power than any other activity in which human beings can engage.

It would be impossible to overemphasize the importance of intercessory prayer. God has chosen intercession as the primary means of releasing His power in the earth. Scripture makes it clear that intercession is one of the central activities in God’s kingdom, both now and in the ages to come.

Unified Prayer Strategy

The vision that God has given us for prayer is to create and maintain a multilevel prayer network that will cover the Valley in prayer at various levels.

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The first level will be a network of individual prayer warriors building a prayer wall that is connected by social media and email who have signed up to receive and pray for prayer requests related to issues facing the community at large. Our goal is to have at least 1,000 individuals in this network that have agreed to respond in prayer to these requests.Contact us to help us build a prayer wall.

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The second level is connecting prayer groups that would agree to do the same thing. These groups might be dedicated prayer groups or life groups from churches that would agree to take 10 minutes of their time together to pray for issues of concern to the region.See the Calendar for Prayer Groups below or contact us to connect your prayer group.

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The third level is 24/7 Prayer that works with churches that agree to cover the city or region in prayer for 24 hours one day each month. The 24/7 leadership team meets together monthly to discern the prayer focus for the month and creates a letter outlining this, along with scripture support, and sends it out to the designated church leaders.See the Calendar for 24/7 Prayer below, or contact us to sign your church up for 24/7 prayer.

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The fourth level is prayer walking. Prayer walking can be any type of walk that is focused on praying for something – an issue or the area that is being walked. For our purposes, prayer walking is when someone commits to walking through a neighborhood or around a school on a regular basis (preferably at least weekly). Studies have shown that the degree to which a community is covered in prayer walking its crime rate will go down. (See Pray 4 Every Home) So, based on this, if we can cover 50% of our community with praying boots on the ground then we can cut crime in half! Imaging covering 100%!Contact us to register as a prayer walker.

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The fifth level is congregational prayer. Many churches have a prayer team that gathers before their main service to pray for the service, the pastor and the needs of the congregation. We believe that this has a major impact on the congregation by inviting the presence of the Lord and preparing the hearts of the worshipers. We would encourage every church to pursue this and to give it a priority. In addition, we believe that there would be exponential results if all of the churches of the Valley were praying for the same thing each week. For instance, if all the churches took a moment each Sunday and prayed for the homeless, we believe that we would begin to see things shift in this critical area of concern for our Valley.

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The sixth level of the strategy is a “Watchmen on the Wall” group. Some might call this a prophetic intercessors or a “Sons of Issachar” group. The intent here is to have a group of particularly gifted individuals who have the God given ability to discern the times in which we live and the issues facing a community, especially from a spiritual perspective. These individuals would be experienced and committed prayer warriors who would meet at least weekly in addition to a significant personal commitment to prayer and pass their discernment on to The Church leadership for input and/or distribution.If you are interested in being a part of a Watchman on the Wall group, please contact us.

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The final level of the prayer strategy is a long-term vision to establish a 24-hour house of prayer and worship in the city that would be served by various worship bands and individual leaders from all the churches in the Valley.If you are interested in being a part of a 24-hour house of prayer, please contact us.